Mireille Poupart

The Invisible in interactive art
Final Essay Interactive Public Art

The Invisible in Interactive Art

Abstract

In Marie Sester’s interactive art installation “Access,” we are confronted with a multifaceted series of experiences that appear at first to be simplistic if critiqued through its visual interpretation. Behind the visual manifestation lies a complex array of processes that are put in place to provide the use with a simple gesture. The viewer is fragmented into three positions: the participant, the web looker and the observing crowd. Together they provide us with a multi-layered understanding of experience. The invisible technical set-up in “Access,” which allows for multi-dimensional gazing of the participant’s experience in real time raises a question of visibility. How do we define the gaze when the experience is distributed between “being seen” and “seeing”? This paper will address the notion of the gaze in new media interactive art by looking at Marie Sester’s Interactive art installation “Access”.

My inquisitive itch for this class’ project:

• Investigate Interactive Public Installations.  “Access” by Marie Sester sparked my attention.
• Her art installation tracks anonymous individuals in public places, by pursuing them with a robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system.

• “Access” presents control tools generated by surveillance technology combined with the advertising and Hollywood industries, and the internet.
• It refers to political propoganda and media manipulation.  Beware. Some individuals may not like being monitored.  Beware. Some individuals may love the attention.

The following video demonstrates how Sester’s installation works and how passerby-viewers experience the piece:  http://www.sester.net/projects/access/access.html

Preliminary findings

“An art form that involves spectators to either experience the piece of art through physical senses or by initiating interactivity in response to the artwork.

When intelligence interactive art recognizes spectator’s requirements, the viewer feels in control of the creation of the art itself.

In interactive art spectator acts as co-creator in affecting the flow of the event.

When the interactive artwork adapts the enjoyable experience in a more meaningful way, it creates an aspect of personalization along with the sense of immersion in the piece of art.”

I have observed how interactive public art engages spectators to interact with other surrounding viewers and creates a multi-connective experience.

Additional info:
“Marie Sester is an artist born in France, currently living in Los Angeles.  She was trained as an architect.  She found art an ideal space to develop her interdisciplinary projects.   Sester sees her art practice as an ongoing process partly defined by a person’s desire to visualize certain things, while making others invisible.”

Sources: Chee-Onn Wong, Keechul Jung and Joonsung Yoon.  “Interactive Art: The Art that Communicates”  Leonardo 42, no. 2 (2009), 180-181

http://gallery.calit2.net/

My inquisitive itch for this class project:

ACCESS lets you track anonymous individuals in public places, by pursuing them with a robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system.

ACCESS presents control tools generated by surveillance technology combined with the advertising and Hollywood industries, and the internet. It refers to political propoganda and media manipluation.

Beware. Some individuals may not like being monitored.
Beware. Some individuals may love the attention.

The ACCESS spotlight system is on tour and travels internationally from one public space to another.

ACCESS will be installed in the main lobby of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) as part of Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870 , October 30, 2010 – April 17th, 2011

http://www.sester.net/projects/access/access.html

http://greyworld.org/

Musica, 2009
As visitors approach the square they encounter a series of thirty columns, positioned within the protective boundary and scattered through the pedestrianized square.

At first glance each column would appear to be an ordinary bollard, ubiquitous in public spaces. However, these objects have been injected with a magic serum that has transformed them into elegant music boxes. As people pass through out the space, the columns respond directly to their motion and spin gently, playing unique fragments of sound.

A matrix of lights, embedded into the columns scores the music with a series of luminous notes. Together the columns form an urban choir, or orchestra, each with their individual voices that would come together to create a harmonious musical performance, capturing people’s presence in the space. The installation creates a series of digital melodies that weave together to create a unique composition, held in the air for a brief moment.

http://greyworld.org/archives/41

Urban Sketches, 2001
Rather than showing a finished and looped piece of video work, the Urban Sketches installation makes the space and its inhabitants the subject of the work and its authors.

A hidden camera records the space and its inhabitants the mirror like screen becoming the visual palette for an altered version of the captured reality. The volume of people, their movements and their spatial relationships generate the ‘treatment’ of the final piece. Watch yourself literally melt into the crowd, before bursting into fire and cruising down the street aflame.

Elements of the composition, which are static, can be treated very differently from those that move; moving people can become swarms of flies, with no solidity, whilst fixed or static elements remain solid even when behind a moving crowd.

As the installation moves through its programmed visual experiments, blue plasma streams through talking lips and trails gesticulating hands, people are reduced to ASCII text where cigarette smoke is transformed into strings of text and people appear to burst into flame.

Urban Sketches has been permanently installed in the SONY flagship store in New York (2001) and in the 360 Degree Gallery in London’s award-winning Sketch bar and restaurant (2003).

http://greyworld.org/archives/182

Words Installation, 2009
“Words” is an installation commissioned by the BBC for the Free thinking Festival, in Gateshead, UK. It was also shown at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome.

Visitors to the installation space are requested to think of a word. Any word at all. They are handed a white cube, which they hold. As they speak their word in to the box, the box begins to glow with a gentle blue light.

They are then invited to explore what appears to be a large empty space, delineated by a red line around its edges. As they wander off in to this area they realise that in fact, invisible to the eye, there is a rich sonic environment to explore, full of words that are nestling amongst trees, flitting around pools of water, or hiding out in caves.

Some of these words live here permanently, and some have been dropped by people walking through the space. If the visitor wants to do this, they simply tip over their box, the light drains away, and their word falls out, living in that area for several hours, for others to discover.. When they are done, they return the box, to be filled by another word.

http://greyworld.org/archives/37

Science & Art:

http://www.susanaldworth.com/flash.html

Internet Hack performance Art:

Human Browser by Christophe Bruno – France

http://www.iterature.com/human-browser/en/

Moveable Type Art Installation:

“Listening Post” is an art istallation, a digital portrait of online communication.

http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~cocteau/

My list of 3 New Media Artists